Personal Safety in the Light of
Transhumanistic Ideology
Security Dimensions. International & National Studies nr 3 (19), 76-90
no. 19; 2016 (76–90)
P
ersonals
afeTy in Thel
ighTof
T
ranshumanisTici
deology assoc. Prof. teresa Grabińska, Ph.D.Military Academy of Land Forces, POLAND
ABSTRACT
the ideology of transhumanism is subjected to analysis for the personal and social safety. Because of the personal safety, to a large extent, is determined by the rules of morality, it poses the question of ethics in transhuman or posthuman society. The reconstructed ethics of transhumanism appears to be close to a hedonism. there is considered the sense of personal safety in three philosophical concepts of society: Platonic, epicurean and Hobbes’. that analysis shows defects of epicurean hedonism and utilitarianism. there-fore it is suggested the aristotelian-personalistic eudaimonism as the best guarantee of personal safety.
ARTICLE INFO
Article history
Received: 03.08.2016 Accepted 27.09.2016
Key words
threats of cyborgization, freedom of posthuman, happiness and personal safety, social determinism
Introduction
the modern mechanistic anthropology arises mainly from thomas Hob-bes’ ontology1 and from more late Julien offray de la Mettrie’s concept2
1 t. Hobbes, Leviathan, Cambridge 2006.
2 J.o. de la Mettrie, Machine Man and Other Writings, trans. and ed. a. thomson,
of machine man. at present, according to transumanism ideology3 the
increasingly dynamic acceleration of Grin4 technologies development is
aimed to gradual cyborgization of human organism which is to be an ideal “machine”. the final “product” of it should be a postcyborg and a posthu-man, i.e. an individual existing beyond being huposthu-man, transcending mate-rial body (biological) restrictions in the virtual world.
the transhuman is supposed to be a transitional phase between a natu-ral human being, representing the last and most perfect link of Darwinian biological evolution. But the future posthuman (overhuman) is supposed to be freed from natural human (biological) limitations and shortcom-ings, even from mortality. Such a perspective now is not only a fantasy of science fiction5 because of more and more new achievements of Grin
technologies, which make it possible to improve the functioning of the human organism and overcome subsequent natural biological barriers. Owing to science and technique, products of human thought and tech-nological practice the transhuman is emerging, who is a human being whose substance and biological dynamism have to be permanently mod-ified, replaced, repaired and controlled from outside and inside by means of special technical devices. the transhuman should not only enhance the possibilities of its physical survival in the best possible condition, but also concurrently improve his intellectual powers, acquire the skills that are and will be characteristic of, for example, computer operating systems, by
3 f. fukuyama, the world’s most dangerous ideas: transhuamnism, “foreign
Poli-cy” 2004, 144 (September-October), p. 42-43, http://www.foreignpolicy.com/arti-cles/2004/09/01/transhumanism (accessed 06.08.2016); N. Bostrom, A history of tranhuamnist thought, “Journal of Evolution and Technology” 2005, 14 (1), p. 1-25; religion and transhuamnism. the unknown future of Human enhancement, C. Mercer, T. J. Troten (eds.), Santa Barbara (CA) - Denver (CO) - Oxford 2015; t. Grabińska, transhumanizm – ochrona i zagrożenia bezpieczeństwa personalne-go [transhumanism – protection and risk of personal safety], [in:] System bezpiec-zeństwa wewnętrznego państwa. Synergia zagrożeń, H. Spustek (ed.),Wrocław 2014; t. Grabińska, Zagrożenia bezpieczeństwa społecznego w ideologii transhumanizmu [threats of social security in the ideology of transhumanism], „Kultura Bezpieczeńst-wa. Nauka – Praktyka – Refleksje”, 2015, no 18 2015, p. 52-73.
4 Grin is an acronym formed from the names of four modern technologies: genetics
(G), robotics (r), informational science (i), nanotechnology (n). this sign suggests the combination of four technologies.
5 S. lem, The Cyberiad. Fables for the Cybernetic Age, trans. M. Kandel, San Diego (ca)
absorbing them to some extent (or inversely – by transferring them to the computer as the so-called mind uploading6), and become a
super-gent being, connected – in the future perspective – to some global intelli-gence. this is the part of the transhumanist cyborgization programme in ncBi convergence7 project.
The important questions of trans- and posthuman life sense as well as the meaning of a personal safety are considered in this article. it will be argued that in order to preserve the human values, it is necessary to spread the personalistic ethics8.
the kinds of humanism and the safety of the human being
Humanism is defined as “a system of values and beliefs that is based on the idea that people are basically good and that problems can be solved using reason instead of religion”9. So, in dictionary of British intellectual circle
the humanism at once is confronted with a religious vision of man. in the further commentary this definition excludes any supernatural reference of him: the man has to be a self-realizing being. Moreover, in the light of the definition the man is „basically good” and he does not needs any divine help to solve every problem, also moral. So, as transhumanism seems to be continuation of the postulated human power to embrace human omnipo-tence, it is simply the humanism in the British sense.
The quoted definition of humanism is not only one. Such a sense of humanism is often qualifying it to anthropocentric humanism10. then the
other kind of humanism is distinguished, i.e. the theocentric humanism
6 http://www.minduploading.org/ (accessed 06.08.2016).
7 B. De Jonge, n. louwaars, Valorizing science: whose values? Science & Society Series on
Convergence Research, EMBO Reports 10 (6) (2009), p. 535-539, www.ncbi.nlm.nih.
gov/pmc/articles/PMC2711827/ (accessed 06.08.2016); Report of Committee on Key Challenge Areas for Convergence and Health, Board on Life Sciences; Division on earth and life Studies, and national research council, Convergence, national acad-emies Press, Washigton (DC) 2014, in which: “Convergence builds on fundamental progress made within individual disciplines but represents a way of thinking about the process of research and the types of strategies that enable it as emerging scientific and societal challenges cut across disciplinary boundaries in these fields”. ncBi is an acro-nym which points out four main disciplinaries where boundaries should be obliterated: nanotechnology (n), cognitive science (c), biology (B), informational science (i).
8 t. Grabińska, Zagrożenia...
9 http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/humanism (accessed 02.08.2016). 10 http://www.angelfire.com/az/experiment/humanism.html (accessed 02.08.2016).
which is releasing all human possibilities, given to man by the creator. owing to the creator, they enable the man to transcend his feeble and mortal physicality (biological life is only an earthly stage of existence), to devise, by taking the divine creativity as a model, a new human world of culture, and, finally, to secure eternal life after the body dies. in accordance with the theocentric humanism the source of human power is supernat-ural. compared with theocentric humanism the transhumanism points out the supernatural power of the man coming alone from oneself. So, the creativity of man has to be not only (as in theocentric humanism) an imi-tation of the God but should be just the God’s.
theocentric humanism is losing in this way an autonomous character at least in ontic and epistemological sense. an ethical problem, however, remains. it means the problem of the good which transhuman (posthu-man) is supposed to carry out. and the aim of the human action is an in-dicator of personal safety11 at the same time. transhumanism provides
a kind of feedback concerning the human condition, in the epoch when the postulates of anthropocentric humanism, engaged in developing in-creasingly new and fast technologies for collecting, processing and trans-mitting data, lead to the situation where these technologies take control over a natural man and represent a being which is not divine, like in the theses of theocentric humanism, but is also supernatural, if naturalness is to be understood in the traditional sense and not through ncBi conver-gence. So, sense of the naturalism, personality and personal identity12 is
also involved in the reconstruction of trans- and post human safety. the personal safety is understood as a condition in which a man can freely realise his humanity (although the essence of humanity can be un-derstood in a variety of ways13). therefore, transhumanism should define
11 cf. t. Grabińska, Etyka a bezpieczeństwo personalne [ethics and personal safety],
Wrocław 2013.
12 considerations of personal identity have a long tradition in the British thought, e.g.:
D. Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, Siuox Falls (SD) 2007; J. Locke, An Essay
Concerning Human Understanding, Indianapolis 1996; T. Reid, Of Identity and of Mr. Locke’s Account of Our Personal Identity, [in:] Personal Identity, J. Perry (ed.), los
an-geles 1975; D. Parfit, Reasons and Persons, Oxford 1984; K.V. Wilkes, Real People:
Personal Identity without Thought Experiments, Oxford 1988, and also: T. Grabińska, The reductionist anthropology and human safety. The study of Parfit’s concept of survival,
“Security Dimensions. International & National Studies”, 2015, no 13, p. 95-105.
13 Ibidem. in British thought there is present a reductionist current in ontology of man.
the said well-being, and, consequently, analyse the elements of man’s per-sonal safety exposed to continuous changes, not only those which take place in his technological environment (technological innovations) and generate changes in the social environment, but also the concurrent changes occurring in himself. up till now, the lack of predictability of such changes was always the source of anxiety, undermining the feeling of per-sonal safety. When such threat was posed to groups, it resulted in greater aggression between them, leading to a decline in structural security, taking the form, for example, of wars14. in the light of transhumanism there arises
the question whether the lack of fate uncertainty is guaranteeing the sense of personal security. in part the answer is suggested in Hobbes’ mechanis-tic anthropology where in a natural state “the life of man [is] solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short”15.
Now, owing to subsequent technological achievements the man should have greater structural security, as the social and natural envi-ronments are supposed to be effectively and comprehensively controlled by a transhuman equipped with the whole network of continuously im-proved and self-teaching monitoring. in the absence of external threat the feeling of personal security increases, and this feeling is to be also stimulated by the emerging awareness of something that can be called a human omnipotence. the symmetrization of the relation between per-sonal safety and structural security would result from the fulfilment of the transhumanist vision in which a super-intelligent overhuman ulti-mately becomes the control centre of the world. Moreover, in transhu-manism project it is arising the possibility of a special cooperation of transhuman (posthuman) consciousness with the conditions being un-der control (in this sense being determined). But how to define this new kind of consciousness when the sense of personal identity of advanced transhuman and posthuman is not clear16.
So, the anticipations of transhumanism concentrate on the realisation of futuristic technological developments and pass over, in line with the still present positivistic trend of contempt for the philosophical thinking about the human existence, ontological (in its metaphysical sense) and
14 t. Grabińska, Transhumanism... 15 t. Hobbes, Leviathan..., ch. XIII, 9. 16 t. Grabińska, The reductionistic...
anthropological reflection17. the extension of the enlightenment
hu-manism programme is manifested in transhuhu-manism as the optimistic application of science and technique for the purpose of improving life of whole communities – ultimately on a global scale. concurrently, this goal coincides with the improvement in structural security – monitoring of the environment and prevention of natural disasters, elimination of epidemics, prevention of famine disasters, ensuring that everyone has equal access to goods and finding solutions to conflicts between groups other than classical combat. all the above contributes to greater per-sonal security of each individual, who – being healthy, well fed, educat-ed, equipped with instruments enabling him to act efficiently, free from worries about ways to secure the future, experiencing the friendliness of other people who do not have to fight against him about anything, and free from any existential anxiety – should strive for self-fulfilment and constantly attempt to go beyond the limits of his self-fulfilment. it sounds like another utopian project for making mankind happy. How-ever, each utopia has its anchor points in real life scenarios of social and political structures18. When attempts at putting the utopia into effect
are made a high degree of instability arises, leading to a reduced level of structural and personal security. next we shall consider the sense of personal safety in the transhumanist utopia19.
three philosophical projects of man’s happiness and personal safety
When one considers the sense of naturalism, constitutive features of hu-man being and moral values three examples of philosophical concepts come to the mind: 1. recalled already earlier mechanistic anthropology by Thomas Hobbes, 2. Plato’s concept of the three classes in the ideal state20,
and 3. Epicurean hedonism.
the society in Hobbes’s philosophy comprises from human individuals, each of them is a mechanism (deprived of free will), better or worse react-ing to stimuli comreact-ing from natural environment. about a human
excel-17 Ibidem.
18 t. Grabińska, Teorie bezpieczeństwa państwa w myśli filozoficznej i politologicznej. Od
Sun Tzu do Józefa M. Bocheńskiego [theories of state security in philosophy and
politi-cal science. from Sun tzu to Joseph M. Bochenski], Wrocław 2013, chs. D1 and D2.
19 t. Grabińska, Transhumanizm...
lence proves the power of his mechanism driven by internal power desire. the man with the greatest power has a mandate to rule other people, pro-vided that the social environment (public opinion) accepts his authority, either voluntarily or under compulsion (it is irrelevant for Hobbes). the project promoters nBci indicate the purpose Society and political development of technology Grinmposed of Hobbes’s human-mecha-nisms is in principle atomised, internally antagonised and kept on a right rein pursuant to the law. Morality is reduced to the efficiency of action permitted in the state. there is no reference to the absolute good, because Hobbes excluded its existence: “for these words of good, evil, and con-temptible are ever used with relation to the person that used them: there being nothing simply and absolutely so; nor any common rule of good and evil to be taken from the nature of the objects themselves”21.
Greek ancient philosophers were trying to define the meaning of hu-man happiness and point out ways to achieve it. Greeks tied lucky individ-ual with a successful state of the social environment and political (state). in the most famous Plato’s concept of class-based ideal state the perfect guardians (the highest class, rulers), i.e. people endowed with special in-tellectual (and, according to Plato, also moral) virtues, rule the state, but subordinate their entire life to such rule, live ascetic life. representatives of the second class – perfectly trained auxiliary guardians (soldiers, law enforcement officers, officials) – are creating administration, police, army and other service staff guard to ensure the (structural) security of the state. they watch to guarantee the perfect guardians’ guidelines are implement-ed, the enacted law is observed and any possible internal and external con-flicts do not pose a threat to the state. the third class – farmers, merchants and others – includes people in their natural existential condition, subor-dinated to the two higher classes, who are not obliged (unlike guardians) to strive for improvement in accordance with the adopted standards, but who can live as they like, provided it does not collide with the order im-posed in the state.
the third considered concept of epicurean hedonism is focused on temporal goals which provide a most happy human life relying on the experience of pleasure and avoidance of pain. epicurus refers above all to the so-called negative pleasure, which allow a man to unite with nature, as if without effort, to last in a state of tranquility (ataraxia) and freedom
from fear as well as an absence of physical pain (aponia). the ensuring a subsistence requires, however, to meet the needs (which are that it al-ways felt as a lack of, or suffering, displeasure). only the state of meeting the needs is perceived as positive epicurean pleasure. experiencing the positive pleasure and the much rarer – the negative gives the meaning to human life and makes it happy. Both the knowledge of the natural world (epicurean physics) and the moral principles are not the purpose of human cognitive efforts, but only a necessary condition to minimize the suffering – respectively due to the risk of natural disasters and due to conflicts in a social environment.
let us confront the above mentioned philosophical projects of personal safety with the ideal of transhumanistic human existence22.
Ad 1. Even without any in-depth considerations it can be stated that Hobbes’s concept justifies the society subject to constant competition and focused exclusively on the measurable usefulness of human actions and human functionality, whose emotionality is degenerated and which is, in the classical sense, amoral. one can not talk, in principle, about the hap-piness of Hobbes’ man because he is still in a state of constant struggle for his own conservation23 and everything that he creates and undertakes serves
the survival. therefore he cares primarily about his individual safety. Does he care about his own personal safety, or to ensure the dignity of himself as a person in his free action? no, in the philosophy of Hobbes there is no place for personal safety, because there is no – unlike in the personalist philosophy – the person as such. it is an individual24.
Ad 2. The man in Plato’s states is also devoid of the characteristics of the person (within the meaning of personalist philosophy). the perfect guardian is exclusively focused on the recognizing the knowledge about the condition of the state and on the designing scenarios of its successful development. it is true that he cares about the state community, but not in order to improve it as a community of persons but to specific training of it in bringing the idea of the state as such. the auxiliary guardian has also to get rid of any emotional needs and to reduce his biological needs
22 t. Grabińska, Zagrożenia...
23 t. Hobbes, Leviathan..., ch. XIII.3-4.
24 the relation between a person and an individual is given in: J. Maritain, Human
Per-son and Society, [in:] J. Maritain, Scholasticism and Politics, trans. M.J. adler, new york
for the effective implementation of state action principles. While the third class – manufacturers – have a relatively large margin of free activ-ities and own biological, emotional and spiritual development, until this development does not impair the state action principles. nevertheless, in the case of Plato’s state model we can talk about personal safety of its cit-izens, but the scope of that safety would be limited compared to the per-sonal safety in perper-sonalist ethics. the perper-sonal safety of perfect guardian would be reduced to freedom to explore of ideal being (to free cognitive improvement). the safety of auxiliary guardian would be reduced to the free improvement of his physical and mental abilities allowing the sub-ordination of the positive law and the effective implementation of it. the personal safety of third class representative covers all mental, emotional and spiritual states as well as the psychophysical harmony. in contrast, there are none (with the assumption in the Plato’s state) requirements to improve the condition of a third caste representative. So, he is simul-taneously exposed to the degeneration of mental and spiritual needs, which in the Plato’s state is tolerated in so far as no danger threatens the structural safety.
Ad 3. The personal safety of Epicurean man is to be free from all suf-fering from anxiety before the forces of nature, death and the supernatural omnipotence. But the epicurean man is not the person in the personalist sense. His freedom is mainly the freedom from all that obligation which is not immediately connected with the avoiding own suffering. there is no sense of the freedom to do good to someone because of him. there is no room for pure altruistic attitude. each altruistic goal is fundamentally tinged with selfishness. the freedom to realize universal values does not exist. the epicurean man strives to continuously improve the structural safety (also provided by technological progress) to get rid of the fear of uncontrolled risks.
three philosophical models of personal safety in the light of transhumanism
in the three considered visions of human safety we try to find the antic-ipations of transhuman safety. comparison of the project of transhuman (postman) with the proposals of philosophy is important because, first, these concepts served to some extent as models of historical organization of the state and society. on the other hand, philosophical discourse allows
qualitative predictions of the project in terms of the practice of individual life as well as of social and political organization.
the condition of transhuman life could more or less be similar to the automated conditions as in Hobbes’ mechanicism, to the social strat-ification as in the Plato’s state or to selfish (egoistic) choices as in the hedonism of epicurus. technological progress update significantly en-hances the potential scenarios and does not exclude any coexistence of their certain forms.
Transhuman can “inherit” from Hobbe’s man: 1. the purely individu-alistic attitude in strengthening their causative power in technicised en-vironment 2. the striving for domination over other human beings, 3. the shaping and manipulating the mentality of others, 4. the bringing ethics to specialized rules of praxeology. the individualization seems, however, to be restricted because of the growth of interdependence among various elements of technicised social and natural environments. the domination over other human beings is quite realistic since cyborgs have greater men-tal and physical capabilities. this domination can manifest itself also in the soft (weak) terror of information- and decision-making. Besides, if the qualification of the human act is brought to the efficacy (as traditionally in utilitarianism25), then the human behaviour, additionally
“impregnat-ed” with standard technical indicators, exclude in principle the traditional ethics: the transhuman (and posthuman) behaviour paradoxically can re-semble a special kind of instinctive behaviour26.
the concept of Hobbes founds a society subjected to continuous competition and focused exclusively on measurable utility of human action, human functionality, the degenerate emotionality, in the classic sense – immoral27.
the classes of Plato’s state are created by specialized groups, which are subject to a hierarchy: from perfect guardians, through auxiliary guardians to manufacturers. the organization of transhumen can increasingly
strat-25 M. Zabierowski, Personalistyczna krytyka utylitaryzmu. Antropologiczna analiza
bryty-jskiej filozofii czynu [Personalist critique of utilitarianism. Anthropological analysis of
British philosophy of action], [in:] Personálna obnova humanity na prahu 21. storočia, M. Klobušická, M. Jozek (eds.), Nitra 2009, p. 105-116.
26 t. Grabińska, Autonomizowanie się infosfery a bezpieczeństwo antroposfery, [in:]
Bez-pieczeństwo personalne a bezBez-pieczeństwo strukturalne IV. BezBez-pieczeństwo w antroposferze i infosferze, T. Grabińska, Z. Kuźniar (eds.), Wrocław 2016, p. 5-20.
ify, too. this time not because of learned skills, but because of the level of technological support of psychophysical condition, probably proportional to financial resources of an individual. this situation is real especially in the period of gradual becoming a cyborg. And here comes the question of whether partial cyborgs will homogeneously cover the whole of humanity, or eventually a new species of human – subdue partial cyborgs (transhu-men) and natural humen, like the natural man subdues animals. only the utopia of total posthuman population tolerate this problem, but poses an-other problem concerning the shape of posthuman freedom. Would it be similar to the freedom of the animals, which in fact are not able to abstract own existence from the environment. they are instinctively responding only to a certain extent. the project promoters nBci indicate the purpose Society and political development of technology Grin optimized detection of external stimuli. in the case of posthuman population that instinct, types of incentives and methods for monitoring the environment (specific self-controlling) would obviously be greatly enhanced28.
the resemblance of transhuman to the man of epicure seems clear. in both concepts there is lack of the eschatological horizon. one and another is given only a wordly (mundane) life. and only a difference appears in the fashion in overcoming the fear of death: the epicurean man is involved in the best fit to nature, whereas transhuman seeks to subjugate nature. this difference comes mainly from distance in time (about 2 300 years) be-tween the epicurean era and modernity. now, because of future technical innovations the transuhumanism project designs complete abolition of the boundary between the mundane and the eternity of man, the individual man, and so somehow transforms the mundane into immortality. So, how to solve the epicurean existential problem it depends on the state of nat-ural science and technology.
in both concepts the human is focused on solving practical problems: to live as long as possible and most pleasant (as in epicurean hedonism) or to live as long as possible (even ever) and the comfortable (as in the project of transhuman and posthuman). the epicurean man as well as transhuman are developing natural science and technology in exactly the same purpose: not to attain the true knowledge but for producing effective tools to manipulate the nature.
epicurean ontology is physicalistic and ultimately – materialistic, whereas the ontology of transhumanism is not clearly declared29. in the
light of Grin technology development every being is to be transformed into an information. this suggest a kind of immaterialism.
the need of personalist ethics in trashumanism project
the transhumanist project will, at least partly, be implemented in the near or distant future. to whom it will serve as a tool for improving personal safety and structural security it depends on wide talk about the good of man and the desired state of social and natural environments. the good of man is traditionally defined in ontology and ethics. So far transhuamnist ethics appears to be a hedonism, because this good, as in epicurean pro-ject, is the human life itself30 (here not necessary in the biological form),
focused on pleasure and comfort. the crucial point is the extent to which pleasure is marked by a selfish or altruistic experience. this has been con-templated in works of utilitarians31.
We have proposed32 so-called personalist eudajmonism for
transhu-manistic ethics. Main arguments against epicurean or utilitarian eudaj-monism are such as:
- because there is no satisfactory method of objectifying the pleasure state of all the human population, it remains only a manipulation of social needs; - human choices of too many possibilities can not be free, because then the
man is not able to properly assess the value of chosen good;
- estimated correctly the good of one community does not have to be si-multaneously considered good by different communities, and even in the objective sense it does not have to be good to another community; - in the absence of any other goods remains only intuitive belief in the virtue
of identifying the good with pleasure. this does not preclude the intuitive belief that there are good experiences, which are difficult to be identified
29 an attempt of transumanist ontology reconstruction is given in: t. Grabińska,
Za-grożenia...
30 D. Parfit, Reasons...; T. Grabińska, The Reductionist... the promoters of nBci project
indicate, however, the social and political purposes of GRIN technology development; cf. report...
31 cf. classical works of utilitarianism founders, e.g.: J. Bentham, An Introduction to the
Principles of Morals and legislation, [in:] The Works of Jeremy Bentham, J. Bowring
(ed.), vol. 1, New York 1962; J.S. Mill, Utilitarianism, Kitchener (ON) 2001.
with pleasure, e.g.: giving one’s life for another person, suffering for the intentions of some good, reparation for harm done to someone.
the third sense of eudajmonism is given in aristotelian ethics33.
ac-cording to aristotle “the man who possesses character excellence does the right thing, at the right time, and in the right way. Bravery, and the correct regulation of one’s bodily appetites, are examples of character excellence or virtue.” (…) „the man whose appetites are in the correct order actually takes pleasure in acting moderately”34. the skill of moderate rational
act-ing is the virtue. in the state of the moral perfection the man does not feel lack of anything, regardless of circumstances in which he is. State of own happiness the moral man “divides” among other people “offering” himself as a natural gift for them35. He, being a part of common good, enters into
relationships with other people and thus retains the fullness of his moral perfection. The most required relation among people is a friendship, espe-cially the perfect one36.
the personalists have enriched the aristotelian perfect friendship for the emotional value of the human person – of love which is modeled on the love of the creator to creation. “the entire person is relative to the absolute, in which alone it can find its fulfilment. its spiritual fatherland is the whole order of goods having an absolute value, and which serve as an introduction to the absolute Whole, which transcends the world. fi-nally, the human person not only bears to God the common resemblance born by other creatures; it resembles Him in a proper and peculiar fashion. it is the image of God”37. the human person, like the man of aristotle
demands for themselves living in the community. “He demands this, first, by virtue of the very perfections which are inherent in him, and because of the fact of this being open to the communications of knowledge and of love (…) Secondly (…) it is because of his needs that the human per-son demands this life in society. taken in the aspect of his indigences, he demands to be integrated to a body of social communications, without which it is impossible for him to attain to his full life and achievement”38.
33 aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. T. Irwin, Indianapolis (IN) 1999. 34 Cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aristotelian_ethics (accessed 06.08.2016). 35 aristotle, Nicomachean..., book VIII.13, 1162 b.
36 Ibidem, book viii.
37 J. Maritain, Human..., part i. 38 Ibidem, part ii.
References:
1. aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. T. Irwin, Indianapolis (IN) 1999. 2. Bentham J., An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and legislation,
[in:] The Works of Jeremy Bentham, J. Bowring (ed.), vol. 1, New York 1962. 3. Bostrom n., A history of tranhuamnist thought, “Journal of evolution and
Technology” 2005, 14 (1).
4. fukuyama f., The world’s most dangerous ideas: transhuamnism, “foreign Policy” 2004, 144 (September-October), http://www.foreignpolicy.com/ articles/2004/09/01/transhumanism (accessed 06.08.2016).
5. Grabińska t., Autonomizowanie się infosfery a bezpieczeństwo antropos-fery, [in:] Bezpieczeństwo personalne a bezpieczeństwo strukturalne IV. Bez-pieczeństwo w antroposferze i infosferze, t. Grabińska, Z. Kuźniar (eds.), Wrocław 2016.
6. Grabińska t., Etyka a bezpieczeństwo personalne [ethics and personal safety], Wrocław 2013.
7. Grabińska t., Teorie bezpieczeństwa państwa w myśli filozoficznej i poli-tologicznej. Od Sun Tzu do Józefa M. Bocheńskiego [theories of state se-curity in philosophy and political science. from Sun tzu to Joseph M. Bochenski], Wrocław 2013.
8. Grabińska t., The reductionist anthropology and human safety. The study of Parfit’s concept of survival, “Security Dimensions. international & na-tional Studies” 2015, no 13.
9. Grabińska t., Transhumanizm – ochrona i zagrożenia bezpieczeństwa per-sonalnego [transhumanism – protection and risks of personal safety], [in:] System bezpieczeństwa wewnętrznego państwa. Synergia zagrożeń, H. Spustek (ed.), Wrocław 2014.
10. Grabińska t., Zagrożenia bezpieczeństwa społecznego w ideologii tran-shumanizmu [threats of social security in the ideology of transhuman-ism], „Kultura bezpieczeństwa. Nauka – Praktyka – Refleksje” 2015, no 18.
11. Hobbes t., Leviathan, Cambridge 2006.
12. Hume t., A Treatise of Human Nature, Siuox Falls (SD) 2007.
13. De Jonge B., louwaars n., Valorizing science: whose values? Sci-ence & Society Series on ConvergSci-ence Research, EMBO Reports 10 (6) (2009). www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2711827/ (accessed 06.08.2016).
14. lem S., The Cyberiad. Fables for the Cybernetic Age, trans. M. Kandel, San Diego (CA) 1974.
15. locke J., An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Indianapolis 1996. 16. Maritain J., Human Person and Society, [in:] J. Maritain, Scholasticism
and Politics, trans. M.J. Adler, New York 1940, ch. III.
17. de la Mettrie J.o., Machine Man and other Writings, trans. and ed. A. Thomson, Cambridge 1996.
18. Mill J.S., Utilitarianism, Kitchener (ON) 2001. 19. Parfit D., Reasons and Persons, Oxford 1984.
20. Plato, The Republic, trans. A. Bloom, New York 1991.
21. reid t., Of Identity and of Mr. Locke’s Account of Our Personal Identity, [in:] Personal Identity, J. Perry (ed.), Los Angeles 1975.
22. Religion and Transhuamnism, The Unknown Future of Human Enhance-ment, c. Mercer, t.J. troten (eds.), Santa Barbara (ca) - Denver (co) - Oxford 2015.
23. Report of Committee on Key Challenge Areas for Convergence and Health, Board on Life Sciences; Division on Earth and Life Studies, and National Research Council, convergence, national academies Press, Washigton (DC) 2014.
24. Wilkes K.v., Real People: Personal Identity without Thought Experi-ments, Oxford 1988.
25. Zabierowski M., Personalistyczna krytyka utylitaryzmu. Antropolog-iczna analiza brytyjskiej filozofii czynu [Personalist critique of utili-tarianism. anthropological analysis of British philosophy of action], [in:] Personálna obnova humanity na prahu 21. storočia, M. Klobušická, M. Jozek (eds.), Nitra 2009.
26. http://www.angelfire.com/az/experiment/humanism.html (accessed 02.08.2016). 27. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aristotelian_ethics (accessed 06.08.2016). 28. http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/humanism (accessed 02.08.2016). 29. http://www.minduploading.org/ (accessed 06.08.2016).
Cite this article as:
t. Grabińska, Personal Safety in the Light of Transhumanistic Ideology, “Security Dimensions. International and National Studies”, 2016, no 19, p. 76–90.
